WHY WE LIKE IT: They certainly open the season with a lot of eye candy.
WHY WE DON'T: Speak very badly of the future's archaeology discipline.
REVIEW: If you stop moving, you might have to think about the past. That's Pike's frame of mind at the top of Strange New Worlds' fourth season (basically the reverse of his attitude in The Cage), after Captain Batel's "death", and when it then becomes a template for the plot itself, I gained more respect for an episode I'd initially seen as a big effects spectacular with iffy conclusions. Over the course of Valles Marineris, the Enterprise will suffer catastrophic failures and come to a complete stop, where else, in the past, and Pike will have to "let go" and "let things happen", cathartically freeing him from his grief and guilt. He faces the past and accepts what has happened - in a way, HAD to happen - and can then move on... though not to the commodore posting he's been offered. Let's not go crazy.
So the Enterprise is sent back 65 million years ago by an interstellar storm, to the Sol system even (which is a little suspect) and face... Martians? It's a warrior culture, not unlike A Princess of Mars's Barsoom (which Pike loved and still has on his shelf), at constant war with the Dol'drms, insectoids from the fifth planet in the system that once crashed their ship on Mars - creating the giant scar that we today call Valles Marineris - and swarmed the planet. Now, the Martians, represented by Saffron Burrows as the impressive Captain Cassell, are willing to do anything to destroy their enemies, including stealing anti-matter from the Enterprise to blow up a planet we know today is no longer there. The characters are wayyy behind this particular viewer (and probably most) - the bug planet is, of course, today's asteroid field, and the explosion will cause the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth and push the planets into cooler orbits that ironically spelled the end of the Martian civilization. Trek fans have to wonder where the Voth are in all this (from Voyager's Distant Origin), while Doctor Who fans will recognize a neat bootstrap paradox, especially once Pike spells everything out at the end - that the storm they were investigating was actually flaring from the planet's explosion deep in the past, and that they were lured in by their own buoy. (Speaking of Voyager, this is like a better, prettier version of its second episode, Parallax.) There were Doctor Who references in the previous seasons, and here Pelia is pretty overt about once looking at such a storm from a police box, like she was a companion. Personally, I've decided she's an incarnation of Iris Wildthyme (though I guess if it had been her own TARDIS, it would have looked like a double-decker bus). But this IS Trek, so the Temporal Prime Directive applies, except where Pike tries to broker peace between Mars and Sol V, which, of course, would imperil humanity's history and is definitely just plain Prime Directive interference with pre-warp civilizations. I get that we're spelling out Trek's philosophy during the meet-and-greet portion of the episode, but they're treading on dangerous territory.
So this retcon of our own history is a bit crazy, but it gives Una the chance to lead a Girl's Night Away Team to what turns out to be Earth (they hide the T Rex as long as they can) for a Dol'drm energy pod. Starfleet vs. dinosaurs - with a great, big homage to Jurassic Park at the end - is some nice eye candy, never mind the Martian ship design, a planet exploding, and that opening on a western planet with Pike and his team riding horses in an anti-grave Monument Valley. Some of Trek's best episodes are bottle shows with few effects, but that's just not the way it's done anymore. If you narrow your eyes at a plot hole, at least they'll fill it with visuals. I don't think it's as good a replacement as they think it is, but it's certainly "cool". The planet mission results in two things of import. One is that Una gets a promotion to Commander (for some reason, I thought she was already there), and La'an punches Raptor of some sort. That's amusing in and of itself, but we later find out that she broke her hand doing it and didn't feel any pain, that in fact, her Augment DNA is starting to assert itself, and will provide her with a subplot for the season. Maybe it'll even lead to events that require her to be wiped from the records and never mentioned in the future, as so many things are in these prequel shows. Discovery shall not be spoken of, and look here, this mission shouldn't be mentioned either. Sheesh, at least give your archaeologists a hint so they can look at Mars and the asteroids again for evidence of early civilizations. The fact that some Martians escaped and spread their DNA around the universe is intriguing too, but no mention of Vulcanoid species (which is what they looked like, especially with their Romulan-style tattoos), so I don't know why we needed that at all.
The review wouldn't be complete without some thoughts on the various other subplots brewing. They establish an amusing rivalry between Scotty and Ortegas - cautious engineer vs. reckless pilot. Uhura gets an intern in the Vulcan A'Sha, who is, like most of her people, a jerk. It's fun for Uhura to interact with a cadet like that since she started the show AS a cadet, but someone so unlike her, it's painful. I just wish she'd stop asking A'Sha how she feels, because that would just be insulting to a Vulcan, and she should know better from her interactions with (even this altogether emotional) Spock. The episode also inches the timeline along, introducing (but not using) a disintegration setting on phasers.
LESSON: You create yourself.
REWATCHABILITY - High Medium: It was just a Medium on first watch - you can't entirely bamboozle me with special effects - but how the plot mirrors Pike's emotional state makes me give it a bit of an uptick.
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